River Restoration. Группа авторов
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significant restoration work.
Another important feature of the ethical principle of biomimicry is that it avoids an important problem in approaches to ecological restoration grounded in Latour’s actor network theory (ANT). According to Eden et al. (2000), a major advantage of ANT is that is does not suppose a radical ontological separation between humans and nature. The problem with ANT, however, is that seeing humans and nonhumans as imbricated in a hybrid network provides no evaluative or ethical criteria that allow us to distinguish bad imbrications from good ones (Eden et al. 2000). Like ANT, biomimicry accepts the inevitable imbrication of humans and nature, and, in keeping with this, it does not seek to preserve or restore a pristine nature free from all human interference. Where it differs from ANT, however, is in the provision of evaluative criteria to judge successful imbrications. This does, interestingly, involve a certain work of purification, for it requires us to consider how nature does things independently of us. Applied to a river basin, this involves asking how nature would do things were we not there, a question which may be answered in various different ways: by considering the general configuration of the river basin before we arrived, by inspecting parcels of more or less wild nature within the basin and extrapolating to other parts, or by developing computer models of the basin based on various input data (geomorphological, climatic, ecological, etc.) and potentially capable of predicting future changes and developments. But this purification does not serve the aim of keeping nature pure or of returning it to a state of purity but rather of enabling humans to learn from the models and measures nature is able to provide, and thus of integrating into our products and our systems those traits of nature that are eminently desirable, especially its effectiveness, appropriateness, and sustainability (Benyus 1997). This does not, of course, imply that all of our ethics may be derived from nature in this way; the ecological standards nature provides give rise to an ecological ethics, an ethic governing our relation to nature, but not an ethic governing interhuman relations. In this respect, biomimicry leaves a significant space open for humans to introduce other ethical criteria and aspirational objectives both into dedicated restoration work and into other complementary biomimetic activities.
Finally, it is also significant that the imitationist paradigm I am proposing lends itself to articulation with certain non‐Western philosophical frameworks, especially Daoism (Mathews 2016). A concrete example of this in relation to rivers is the Dujiangyang irrigation scheme, developed along the Min River in 256 BCE, which, instead of damming the river, as is very often the case in contemporary China, took natural flood patterns as a model for a network of irrigation channels that “harmlessly and productively dispersed the flood waters across the flood plain” and whose sustainability is manifest in the fact that it is still in use today, over 2000 years later (Mathews 2019, p. 35). Here, then, we have an example of a river that, precisely because of the ecologically benign but economically and socially productive way its watershed was developed in the first place, is not even in need of restoration.
2.4 Conclusions
If we are to see river restoration not simply as a technical endeavor theorized by the applied science of restoration ecology but rather as itself an activity to which questions of ethics are central then we must engage with environmental ethics. But discussions of restoration in environmental ethics often presuppose a vision of ecological restoration – the restoration of a clearly delimited portion of wilderness – that is of little relevance to typical cases of river restoration. Taking various significant attributes of river restoration into account, it further becomes clear that successful river restoration will ultimately depend not just on restoration work itself but also on the transformation of human activity present in the surrounding watershed. For the most part, however, theorists of river restoration have concentrated only on activities that belong within the clear rubric of restoration and so have not adequately considered the necessity for a broader environmental ethic that extends to such fundamental human activities as farming, industrial production, and the planning and design of cities, all of which significantly affect the character of rivers. This broader ethic, the basic principle of which is to take nature as measure, may be found in biomimicry, understood as an organizing concept capable of bringing together and providing a basic theoretical framework for a wide range of human activities, ecological restoration included, thus resolving the fundamental problems present in preservationism, restorationism, and ANT, while also lending itself to articulation with certain non‐Western philosophical traditions, notably Daoism.
As far as policy is concerned, the principal recommendation that follows from the position presented in this chapter is that river restoration should not be seen as an isolated and self‐contained activity but rather as a part of a broader systemic change, one that embraces the “Biomimicry Revolution” proposed by Benyus (1997, p. 2), and, in so doing, adopts the new environmental paradigm of imitationism. This approach would both require and facilitate collaborations among a wider range of stakeholders than is typically the case when river restoration is seen as an isolated activity cut off from what takes place in other areas of the river basin.
A second important policy recommendation concerns the need to articulate the ecological standards that derive from nature with other standards deriving from both interhuman ethical constraints (justice, participation, etc.) and contingent human demands and aspirations. Applied to river restoration, this means that, while there should be broad acceptance of the need to derive ecological standards from nature, in this instance the river (and its surrounding watershed) in something like its natural state, these standards must be articulated with other standards – social, economic, etc. – that derive from its present human inhabitants. If done intelligently, this will not necessarily involve a clash of standards and values, as is the case when preservationists lament human activity in general for its negative consequences on natural value, for respecting nature’s standards would not only constrain but also enable the attainment of other specifically human standards, as exemplified by the ancient Dujiangyang irrigation scheme in China, which, in imitating natural flood patterns, allowed that floodplain to become “the richest agricultural area in China” (Mathews 2019, p. 35).
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